Dallas police officer receives 20-day suspension over incident caught on dash cam video
A Dallas police
officer was recently suspended for 20 days over January 2011 incident in which
he hit a vehicle burglary suspect with a squad car.
Officer Clark
Staller, who was hired in 2008, received the suspension during a disciplinary
hearing last month.
According to
Dallas police records, internal affairs investigators found he placed another
person in greater danger than necessary when he used his squad car to block a
fleeing suspect, that he was untruthful to a supervisor when he told him that
he hadn't hit the man and that he entered inaccurate information into a police report.
Staller denied
intentionally hitting the man and said he did not realize initially that he had
hit the man.
"There was
no intent to deceive or falsify information on my part," he wrote in his
statement to internal investigators.
According to
Dallas records, Staller and another officer were dispatched to a burglary of a
motor vehicle call in January 2011. While investigating the call, the other
officer spotted the suspected burglars at a gas station around Keist Boulevard
and Highway 67.
When they tried
to do a traffic stop, the two suspected burglars fled on foot. While attempting
to stop one of them, Staller used his squad car to try to block the man in. The
squad car slid in the gravel, struck the rear door area of a motel.
The man
continued to run and Staller caught him after a brief foot chase.
A supervisor
who responded to the scene asked Staller if he had hit the man with his squad
car. Staller replied, "No, I did not hit him." He also told an
accident investigator that he had not hit the man.
Staller said
the man didn't mention anything to him at the scene about being injured. Later
at the jail, the suspect told another officer that he had been hit with the
squad car. The officer told Staller, but he said he didn't believe the man was
telling the truth.
"Suspects
lie all the time," Staller said.
At the
hospital, it was determined that the man had suffered a fractured ankle.
Staller told
investigators that he did not believe that he had hit the man until about two
weeks later when he saw dash cam video which indicated that he had.
During his
disciplinary hearing, Staller said he now understood that trying to block the
man with his squad car was the wrong thing to do.
"You have
to understand that a vehicle is weapon and I realize I screwed that up. I
should have not have done that," he said, according to an audio recording
obtained by The Dallas Morning News.
However,
Assistant Chief Vince Golbeck, who supervises the city's seven patrol stations,
said he did not believe that he didn't immediatley know he had hit the man.
"This
whole situation is very disturbing to me," Golbeck told Staller during the
hearing. "It's hard to me to understand that a trained officer hits an
individual and does not know about it."